How to Spur and Maintain Innovative Spirit in Your Team

by Melissa Burns

Innovation is the driving force of progress, which is a vital element of business development. To put it simpler, if you want your business to grow, you must incorporate innovation into it. This does not mean that you should update your equipment and learn new techniques only. You also need to apply innovation in product development, and there are no better people to come up with new creative ideas than your own employees.

As a business owner who wants to see their company grow and launch products that go viral, you must create an environment where people working for you would be able to create such products.

How to Spur and Maintain Innovative Spirit in Your Team

1. Give your employees time to come up with ideas

If you want your employees to actually develop valuable ideas to the point where they can present them as viable products/services/improvements, you need to give them time to dedicate to this task. When people working in your office run around for 9 hours without a break, they will be too exhausted to even think about innovation. Therefore, start with analyzing your schedules and monitor each employee’s progress. Ensure they have a chance to rearrange their working timetable to dedicate a portion of the day to developing their ideas.

2. Provide your team with the tools to work better

Today, you can find a variety of tools that will make your teamwork more efficient, which will also help to free up the extra time you need for nurturing the culture of innovation. There are specialized business management solutions, like WORKetc or Zoho that are designed for maximizing overall efficiency. If you want a solution that would work perfectly for your team, you should find .NET developers (if you use Microsoft software) or a mobile development services (if you prefer apps) to create a custom piece of software.

Don’t forget about optimizing the efficiency of inter-team communication as well. Tools like Yammer and HipChat will help you with this.

3. Reward ideas, even if they don’t make it to the production line

Everyone loves rewards, no matter how small they are. Therefore, the best way to motivate your people to be creative and come up with innovative ideas is to show that they will be rewarded for them.

Offer encouragement (at least in the form of feedback) for every idea you get, regardless of whether it works out in the end. Your employees must see that you are approachable and interested in listening to them.

4. Teach your employees to make a product out of an idea

In order to get the ideas that are truly valuable, you need to educate your employees on how to develop them right. Make sure every person working for you understands exactly the path a concept travels to become a product. When they know how the process works, they would be able to prepare a decent presentation, so you’ll reduce the number of unfeasible ideas in general.

The simplest steps of the development process can go like this:

Come up with an idea.

Develop a prototype.

Research the market to find the buyer niche for the prototype.

Develop a model.

Make a presentation.

Encourage Innovation in a Productive Environment

Creating an environment where innovation can bloom is a complex process, and each element is equally important. Your main goal as a business owner is to let your employees know that innovative ideas are welcome and create opportunities to develop them. Make the encouragement of creativity a part of your company’s vision and incorporate it into your culture. This way, every new person who comes to work for you will know that they have an opportunity to improve the overall business with their suggestions and achieve recognition through them.

Melissa Burns is an education blogger, and a new teacher. She was studying in Columbia and those years inspired her to dedicate her life to teaching. She graduated from Iowa State University and is passionately interested in informatics, writing, and educational activism. She has already visited 38 countries and is planning to travel around the globe. Follow her @melissaburns and contact her at burns.melissaa@gmail.com